The former aide, James A. Wolfe, 57, was charged with lying repeatedly to investigators about his contacts with three reporters. According to the authorities, Mr. Wolfe made false statements to the F.B.I. about providing two of them with sensitive information related to the committee’s work. He denied to investigators that he ever gave classified material to journalists, the indictment said.

[...]

Mr. Wolfe’s case led to the first known instance of the Justice Department going after a reporter’s data under President Trump. The seizure was disclosed in a letter to the Times reporter, Ali Watkins, who had been in a three-year relationship with Mr. Wolfe. The seizure suggested that prosecutors under the Trump administration will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama.

The war on unofficial transparency continues -- this time ensnaring a reporter. The indictment [PDF] shows Wolfe was in regular contact with four unnamed reporters and the classified info leaked apparently related to the investigation of Carter Page. (The indictment refers only to MALE-1.).

Despite all the dots connected by the Justice Dept. after hoovering up email and phone records of four reporters, none of the charges brought against Wolfe involved mishandling classified info. All three charges listed are for lying to the FBI, not exposing secret info. While the info obtained may have been necessary to prove Wolfe lied to investigators, it does seem like a serious breach first amendment boundaries for nothing but vanilla "lied to the feds" charges. Those charges are mostly there for the government to punish people when it thinks it can't nail down more serious charges.

And it is a breach of expected norms, if not a reliable indicator of how many civil liberties the government is willing to doormat to hunt down leakers and whistleblowers.

Under Justice Department regulations, investigators must clear additional hurdles before they can seek business records that could reveal a reporter’s confidential sources, such as phone and email records. In particular, the rules require the government to have “made all reasonable attempts to obtain the information from alternative, non-media sources” before investigators may target a reporter’s information.

In addition, the rules generally require the Justice Department to notify reporters first to allow them to negotiate over the scope of their demand for information and potentially challenge it in court. The rules permit the attorney general to make an exception to that practice if he “determines that, for compelling reasons, such negotiations would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security, or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.”

It's not clear all these steps were followed. But there are a whole lot of exceptions available to the FBI to bypass these steps meant to protect the First Amendment. No one seems to have been notified beforehand, and it was far more than call/email metadata that was obtained. The indictment cites the content of encrypted messages -- suggesting yet another area where the FBI's "going dark" rhetoric is overblown.

After the story was published, WOLFE congratulated REPORTER #3, using Signal, stating "Good job!" and "I'm glad you got the scoop." REPORTER #3 wrote back, using Signal,"Thank you. [MALE-l] isn't pleased, but wouldn't deny that the subpoena was served."

Going after reporters' records may become standard operating procedure. The Obama Administration prosecuted more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. This administration appears ready to dwarf Obama's numbers.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last year that the Justice Department was pursuing about three times as many leak investigations as were open at the end of the Obama administration.

If the DOJ isn't going to give the First Amendment a wide berth, it's not going to be much friendlier to the rest of them -- like the Fourth. Aggressive pursuit of leakers -- and the attendant collection of reporters' communications/data -- will continue. The DOJ may have guidelines meant to limit investigators from obtaining journalists' records, but they're not much practical use when they can be waived to preserve the "integrity of the investigation."

Reader Comments

Doesn't it all depend upon Where's The Harm,?

Along with Who's in Office?

If the information 'leaked' is merely an embarrassment to the government, no matter which level or agency, then there should be no harm to said leaker, and maybe even a reward. If the information leaked is actually about current, legitimate, relevant (all three are necessary) operations, then maybe some investigation might be appropriate. But the point of that investigation is to protect an ongoing operation, not to 'get' someone.

I think, however, that many of these investigations are about embarrassment, where the leaked information shows government wrongdoing rather than exposure of classified information that actually should be classified, rather than classified because someone might be embarrassed by the exposure, for whatever reason (be it corruption or ineptitude or cronyism or bribery by lobbyists or shear stupidity, or actual government wronging (looking at you NSA)). I have no problem with classifying information about ongoing, current operations that have actual national security implications, but the whole 'classifying just because' has gotten way, way out of hand. Think about how many CIA operations about trying to 'democratize' other nation states that went terribly, terribly wrong. Not only should these not have been classified, they should never have been attempted.

As to the point of going after media persons to make a case against a 'suspected leaker', it seems wholly inappropriate. The 1st Amendment makes it clear. The journalist is not the leaker, they are the disseminator. The leak came from elsewhere. To violate the 1st Amendment just in order to make a case against a suspected leaker does not comport with the meaning or implications of the 1st Amendment. It sure seems that law enforcement should first need to prove that 1) the information leaked was not only classified, but that it needed to be classified, 2) that the need for classification was not merely to prevent embarrassment or government wrongdoing or corruption or cronyism or other bad thing, but actually put current, needed operations in jeopardy, 3) that the need to prosecute 'someone' is more than just trying to stop leaking, which looked at another way might just be actually patriotic, 4) that going after a journalists records is actually pertinent to the case, which does not mean that it proves the case against the leaker, but that it is actually part of the case, meaning that the journalist was actually participating in espionage, and not just reporting.

As to the lying to Federal Agents, is there any way that one cannot be 'proven' to be lying to them? They ask questions in such ways as to allow a variety of answers, and any of those answers that do not comport with their perception of what the answer should be is deemed lying. One might honestly say where they thought they were on the 25th of a month several months ago and be wrong. That is not a lie, it is an error. But not to these guys.

Re: Doesn't it all depend upon Where's The Harm,?

It is especially damning once you realize that the FBI doesn't bother with the truth at all now. They have found that making up terrorist threats and providing false statements to the public and courts give them greater powers than ever granted by the government.

Re: Where's The Crime?

.... big picture here is that a rogue national police agency seized a private citizen's personal communications records without even any suspicion of that person having committed any crime. This is a direct violation of 4th Amendment.

This is nothing new in the FBI long sordid history, nor in DOJ history, nor NSA history. Only new twist is that FBI/DOJ isn't even slightly embarrassed by public disclosures of this criminal behavior. J.Edgar Hoover at least was discreet in his official crimes.

It is no crime whatsoever for any private American citizen to simply 'communicate' with a government employee. A government employee transmitting restricted government information to a private citizen might 'himself' be committing an offense -- but that in no way automatically indicts that private citizen recipient as a criminal offender. That private citizen being a journalist merely compounds the government crime.

The egregious double-standard is, of course, that the FBI is free to lie to anybody it desires, including the general American public. FBI agents routinely impersonate other people/entities, corporations, phony web sites... lie to suspects & witnesses, prosecutors, judges. Martha Stewart, despite her megabucks, went to prison for a trivial misstatement to FBI interviewer in a casual phone call. Comey's official lies were classic.That FBI operates outside the Constitution is not a newsflash.

black bag jobs R us

I literally fled the US after 13 years of what is colliquialy called organized gang stalking, that started in 2003-4 because I wrote Americas first story about manufactured terrorism.

But there is zero checks or balances in the US anymore, nor oversight at the pefestrian level, and black bag jobs are very real, in use every day across America to stifle dissent, and suppress truth.

The black bag jobs are used BEFORE these cases get this far, and few will talk about them, fearing bigger consequences and. attacks.

That story was in a college newspaper in Minnesota, and the subject of the story,a Somali mannamed Mohammed Warsame, spent six years in solitary confinement(according to official sources)after the story ran. He eventually plead guilty to aiding terrorism, and was said to have left for Canada.

Then, my life became a freeway of bizarre events, and even more bizarre and constant encounters with strange events and even stranger people. Many, most of them affiliated with AIPAC/Israel libbies, but not all of them.

As it turns out, Warsame could well have been an informant, and many/all of the fake terrorism from Somalis in that area happened after that.

I was constantly approached online by informants, online redirections~including hackers leaving a sign in page that redirected to pigo pins and electronics~ and my home security cameras destroyed repeatedly by "mysterious gangs", and my homes broken into, things shuffled around, things stolen, and returned,and worse, for a decade.

It took me ten years to get that story of manufactured terrorism into the MSM, because repukelicans and demorats make sh!tloads of money suppressing real stories.

So~why dontcha just call the cops, then~because it is them doing it, and I refused to collaborate in that schema, or cede ny .privacy rights, and due process right to be left alone.

But America, its reporters, and its activists are being targeted at a military pace, and MSM pundits cannot seem to get past partisan hacking and demagoguery enough to solve the problem, and unite for civil liberty and due process of law.

And all of that because Israel firsters, many of them Mossad, have infiltrated all levels of government, intelligence, and the press; and aided by an army of FBI/DHS rats and informants, and private contractors.

Seymour Hirsch has a lot to say about this too, but its over in the US~because reporters are not loyal, or diligent about the ENTIRE Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

Re: black bag jobs R us

My favorite part of this fantasy is that a vast, evil, criminal conspiracy is hell-bent on destroying your life, disrupting your internet access, vandalizing and breaking into your home, but also unable to shut down a Wordpress blog.

Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

It seems that Techdirt's comment section has now attracted another zealot who finds every opportunity to educate us about something of dire importance.

For years there was 911 Truth, now it's "organized gang stalking" (yes, I googled it)

That's not to say that there's not some truth in what these people are claiming --there usually is-- but often times their facts are highly distorted, and they won't listen when you try to correct them. The 911 Truthers were a determined, hard-headed bunch that [thankfully] slowly fizzled out. Maybe those people found a new home in the "organized gang stalking" movement? let's hope not.

In any case, we'd better get used to being told to "google organized gang stalking."

No~organized gang stalking is almost its own category of reality~a horrifying reality that encompasses or touches upon all western police brutality and gray area jurisprudence.

And, even you yourself likely still peek at the dancing Israelis videos every now and again, with Leonard Cohen singing Hallelujah echoing like a sonic weapon off of your skullcap/tinfoil hat/satellite dish/whatever.

Gang stalking is a heinous abuse of due process,and crosses all legal and ethical boundaries.

I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking#Stalking_by_groups___________________________________________ A study from Australia and the United Kingdom by Lorraine Sheridan and David James compared 128 self-defined victims of 'gang-stalking' with a randomly selected group of 128 self-declared victims of stalking by an individual. All 128 'victims' of gang-stalking were judged to be delusional, compared with only 3.9% of victims of individual-stalking.

There were highly significant differences between the two samples on depressive symptoms, post-traumatic symptomatology and adverse impact on social and occupational function, with the self-declared victims of gang-stalking more severely affected. The authors concluded that "group-stalking appears to be delusional in basis, but complainants suffer marked psychological and practical sequelae. This is important in the assessment of risk in stalking cases, early referral to psychiatric services and allocation of police resources."___________________________________________

Re: I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

Well clearly the only possible explanation for that is that the ones doing the study were themselves compromised and paid to hide the truth. There really isn't any other option when you think about it.

Re: Re: I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

That "internet famous"study appeared in the NYT in the runup to Hillarys fail in 2016, in an article written by a Canadian journalist of dubious provenance, Mike McPhate.

His .body of work up to that point indicates he is an ideal mockingbird, and likely the article a deep state CYA, as people began to realuze that the NSA Octopussycon job was being turned on them.

The inteligent reader would note that my blog is a refutation of the shoddy, self serving navel gaze of that Wiki blurb above.

Sheridans is a police and carceral state funded study of the anonymous internet~her respondents were anonymous^$$holes just like the posters above.

Lorraine Sheridan~a speech patholigist who works in the prison system, and her consort in ivory towers, David James write all kinds of navel gazing academic .pap that utilizes the Us v Them approach to policing and psycholigy, while somehow utiluzing terms from the 1950s.

In the age of the internet, which is filled with anonymous shitposters from criis PR firms, and the Save Starving Israeli Zionists Foundation,and any of many alphabet soup agencies, like the ones above my comment here.

But I welcome and invite ANY AND ALL REFUTATION, from non~anonymous cowards, like those above.

And: try not to see patterns in the data, or you will be attacked by trolls like these above.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

While you might get away with saying such things during the weekends, please be aware that statements like that will get your posts disappeared from the comment board, often within minutes. If you consider yourself well versed in gang stalking, get ready for an education in gang slapping, which is what you'll be getting here if you don't clean up your act.

Re: Re: I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

It seems that every time there is a crisis PR/pop psychology quiz online, the same large group of middle aged to elderly white females-many of whom work IN crisis PR,pop psycholiogy,or in social work, academia, etc-it seems these surveys are ALWAYS white females from the Andrea Dworkin era responding.

And,many of them ALSO derive income from the exact institutions that benefit from Organized Gang Stalking denialism: fakerape industry, yellow journalism,

Dont let the patterns drive you crazy though,lol-because every single other Public Relations/crisis creation EVER in the USA was drivenby Edward Bernaysstyled propaganda hoaxing.

Actual victims of highly organizedgang stalkung however, arefrequently dead, orincarcerated AFTER extensive, many years long, highlypersonalized onlinegang stalking,that comes OFFLINE in the form of "community policing,"which violatesthe spirit, andtheletter of the law.

Worse, many massshooters, ranging from the Virginia Tech shooter, to Mathew Riehl in Colirado, tomany, many others, were being stalked aftervoucing unpopular sentiments online-and thecade.of William Atchison of New Mexico, we seethat British intellugence flagged him for using “bad words”during #Gamergate, and then kicked the case to the FBI, who then waged covert surveilance, using online and offline surveillance, and provocateurs.

Re: I skipped Google and went straight to Wikipedia:

The Martha Mitchell effect is the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other mental health clinician labels the patient's accurate perception of real events as delusional and misdiagnoses accordingly.

Psychologist Brendan Maher named the effect after Martha Beall Mitchell.[3] Mrs. Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, Attorney-General in the Nixon administration. When she alleged that White House officials were engaged in illegal activities, her claims were attributed to mental illness. Ultimately, however, the facts of the Watergate scandal vindicated her and garnered her the label, "The Cassandra of Watergate".

Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

No,its really about YOU! YOU,YOU, AND ANONYMOUS COWARDLY YOU!

And, black bagjobsthat target reporters, for decades, of course, because acertain cancerous, free speech monitoring organization is always afraid the great golem in the sky might fall down on their heads and burst their safe-space-for-mystical babble bubble.

Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

Hmm. Total distraction/diversion/whattaboutery/Wordpress as a useful honeynet comment.

You should take a free community college class in Internet.Really. Colleges have those.Really.

But be careful Professor Fuck YOUR LIFE FINKELSTEIN doesnt redirect you into his web of AIPAC sponsored FBI informant assignments, like they do to Somali kids,and Yemenis,Bosnians, and now, Syrians, and Kurds, and.....

Meet Profesor Fuck your life Finkelstein!(not to be confused with Mind Formin Norman Finkelstein, who was gang stalked out of a professorship in Chicago because he wrote about the Holocaust Industrial Complex)

Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

You seem to be well versed in the existence of secret Israeli/Jewish covert spy networks that "they" don't want anyone to know about. ...

So tell me, Mr. Ogs, was 19th-century Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion a real or fake document?

Was Alison Chabloz a victim of organized gang stalking, and is that why she may be facing a harsh prison sentence for the crime of uploading YouTube videos of awful singing (no joke, she was convicted in a British court a couple of weeks ago)?

Re: Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

That "internet famous"study appeared in the NYT in the runup to Hillarys fail in 2016, in an article written by a Canadian journalist of dubious provenance, Mike McPhate.

His .body of work up to that point indicates he is an ideal mockingbird, and likely the article a deep state CYA, as people began to realuze that the NSA Octopussycon job was being turned on them.

The inteligent reader would note that my blog is a refutation of the shoddy, self serving navel gaze of that Wiki blurb above.

Sheridans is a police and carceral state funded study of the anonymous internet~her respondents were anonymous^$$holes just like the posters above.

Lorraine Sheridan~a speech patholigist who works in the prison system, and her consort in ivory towers, David James write all kinds of navel gazing academic .pap that utilizes the Us v Them approach to policing and psycholigy, while somehow utiluzing terms from the 1950s.

In the age of the internet, which is filled with anonymous shitposters from criis PR firms, and the Save Starving Israeli Zionists Foundation,and any of many alphabet soup agencies, like the ones above my comment here.

But I welcome and invite ANY AND ALL REFUTATION, from non~anonymous cowards, like those above.

And: try not to see patterns in the data, or you will be attacked by trolls like these above.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

"Chablaz followed ME on Twitter two years ago. What does that tell you, you moron?"

It tells me that Alison Chabloz is even nuttier than I thought. While I admire people who volunteer to martyr themselves for the ideals of free speech, it would serve the cause better to have a somewhat respectable person going to prison instead of a conspiracy kook. The problem, of course, is that respectable people tend to keep their mouths shut, and let the kooks be the cannon fodder for a "justice" system that -- even in 21st century Britain -- considers heresy to be a high crime worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.

Though it's worth noting that in the UK, the very kookiest of kooks, people like David Icke, who claims that the British Royal Family are lizards from outer space or whatever else, has never been charged with any speech crime. Perhaps Alison Chabloz should take note of this when she gets out of prison.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

--The problem, of course, is that respectable people tend to keep their mouths shut....

Is the fundamental PROBLEM, and why we live in a two tiered secret police state today. Can you make that connection?

Certainly, the founders knew that respectability requires wealth~and pseudonyms, and ciphers, and more~ to hide that respect behind. The rest of us dont have that luxury.

As for Chablaz~no one chooses free speech problems~the various radical zionist/dominionist NGOs, and the NSA dump them in our laps, and then cry like Esther that the sky is faling after their domestic terrorism, speech policing, and chronic harassment of speakers is brought into the light.

She followed my now defunct Twitter account that I used to reverse engineer real time speech policing by the US FVEY, and Israel squad 3200 during the 2016 election year.

The ACLU issued a report three months later about how the Fusion Centers were using DataMinr as a firehose dump, and doing bad things with it, these things which violate pure speech, and which demonstrably got activists killed.

Like any/all activists, we are under constant attacks from religious nutters of many stripes~thet literally target pure speech online from many agencies, undermining the essence of democracy.

So, Chablaz, nutty as she seems, was under literal attacks of many kinds: hacking/redirection of web search results/likely staljed in public by so called community poluce (the Shomrim and the Vatican guard, lol), and now we see she has the legal troubles.

I mean~ look at how many small crimes certain people get away with just so they can hold up one of her AFTER their many "good works"? Truly, the western religious nuttery is insane.

The entire western christianity is a reaction formation to that lunacy.

Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

Um. You are aptly named. And you err in the criminal conspiracy supposition, because its easier to prove civil conspiracy in these cases. Not that they arent criminal, but the money is in proving civil conspiracy first.

Both the white and black BLM movements,the Tea Party, Ferguson and Baltimore activists~all have experienced similar things.

OneBfederal agent, DanLove even kept a "kill book" and bragged about stalking people to suicide.

And a very long list of activists of all races and skin shades...except one group, which(for some reason) has suffered zero losses of freedom, or activists.

So, sure~wutever pal.

The blig,ifyou read it,documentsattackson Tor, Metasploit exploutation, and lots of Jscript errorstargeted at it asI write, because a main complaint oftargets is that JTRIG/NSA/FBI/Alphabeticus~ADLicus attacks and hacks us in realtime.

Re: Re: black bag jobs R us

I appreciate your humor.

Julian Assange, who was accused of #fakerape by a couple women of dubious provenance(what are commonly called swallows in the IC, no pun intended....) who invited him to Sweden, and invited him to have sex with them~multiple times~well, he probably doesnt appreciate your humor as much.

And those women Anna Ardin, etc? Seems they worked in one of the many deep state intel cutouts in Cuba, where you might not have heard~but actual sound weapons were suspected to have been used on 21 US diplomats.

Look at how Gizmodo doesnt name him, as if hes a fakerape victim, while responsible media names him, and details his long history if waffling suppiort of the erosion of due process for the little people:

"Ali Watkins, who had been in a three-year relationship"

Leaves out key point of 20-something "reporter" with 50-year-old Security Chief. Romance wasn't her motive. There's no plausible way that young pup got the scoops -- while seasoned reporters did not -- except by providing sex.

So any reasonable take on this story starts with Watkins as very like Mata Hari: a SPY, not intrepid reporter.

That is FACT well supported by those emails, and so those are entirely proper target of investigators.

Since FACT, then this from NYT:

The seizure suggested that prosecutors under the Trump administration will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama.

and this by TD minion:

how many civil liberties the government is willing to doormat to hunt down leakers and whistleblowers.

are simply scurrilous lies attempting to cover up for obvious idiot who was useful to The Establishment New York Times.

Of course the FBI isn't admirable either. But the NYT is covering its own operative. Everyone knew that a 20-something reporter wasn't getting inside info by hard work.

Re: Re: "Ali Watkins, who had been in a three-year relationship"

Never mind the fact that Petraeus leaked stuff to his mistress, but you'd never see blue admit that. Sure, the FBI is despicable, but he'd rather saw off his arm than have to agree with a "Techdirt minion".

Masnick, when are you going to put out that article that suggests that breathing is necessary for life?

Re: "Ali Watkins, who had been in a three-year relationship"

Well, obviously. That's the way the world works, and has always worked. But even in the current day of the 'no holds barred' media, it's still very politically incorrect to express that observation in public, not unlike the way that obvious homosexual relationships must be completely ignored and pretended not to exist until the people involved make an official announcement.

I wonder if many of the Obama-loving liberals who chose to look the other way when *their* president was abusing his constitutional power ever anticipated the day that a future president (that they hate) would be committing abuse of a similar nature that their very silence helped enable.

Re: Re:

I wonder if many political party nut jobs abhor the silly comparisons between parties when ever some shit hits the fan. I bet they do, and then they vote along party lines because what their guy does is ok, no matter what. Simply amazing it is.

Re: Re: Re:

Eh, sometimes they choose whom they believe to be the least immoral person. In the case of Trump many people held their noses and placed their hopes in a conservative Supreme Court pick, the idea being that whatever else the president did could be undone by the next administration — but a Supreme Court nomination? Other judicial appointments? Not a chance. They will endure. I learned this while researching for that blog post which will probably be finished on Wednesday since I'm going out tonight.

The point is, the team game you think it boils down to isn't as cut and dried as you would like it to be. Meanwhile the Dems need to get their act together since all they've managed to do so far is create a Hillary-shaped power vacuum into which Trump and his acolytes have poured. They can't win folks over on a negative and the last Hope and Change they promised didn't get delivered, no matter who is to blame.

We also need to use the right words to describe things. Obama had a deep red neocon streak running down his back, which explains why he went after whistleblowers, Dotcom, and expanded surveillance and the drone strike program.

AC @ 9 Jun 2018 @ 6:43am is right about this: don't create powers that other people might one day abuse. Because they totally will. Now watch as Kang creates powers for Kodos to abuse.

Re:

Re: Re:

They do it across the board, seeking cash and real estate like pirates.

But it is strikingly obvious that the poor, many of whom ARE NOT gang members, are Ich Dude into guilt by association, while guys like former mob boss Franzese now runs a church, and makes millions for Jesus, while working hand in hand with the Alphabet Soup mob.

Meanwhile, an interesting feature of gang stalking complaints and alleged delusion is that many online claim that directed energy sound weapons are being used to harass them.

Here is proif of this claim, where a Republican .political operative was evacuated from a US consulate after bein attacked with a sound weapin, aka nouse disturbance:

Re:

The Church of Scientology employs a multi-tiered approach to its stalking operations, employing the "noisy" investigation that has the person followed and hounded relentlessly through mainly private investigators. One common "trick" is to go door to door to "interview" neighbors, asking leading questions such as if they have ever suspected the person of being a child mollester. They might notice that an awful lot of cars seem to be trying to run them off the road. At the same time there are other PIs who conduct surveillance (both legal and illegal) much more quietly. Also, the person's neighbors, classmates, co-workers, friends, lovers, and everyone else in their life may turn out to be Scientology plants, and sometimes even their lawyers. The surveillance can last for the rest of their lives.

Re: Re:

Good input, and great article, Thank you.

Yes~Pinellas County FL is full of this activity, where the local police/sheriffs/political operatives/relugiou whack jobs unspecified target individuals internet conections for blackmail and compromise operations.

Yes, Scientologists are on record gang stalking, and filling the internet with disinformation. And on record .in Pinellas Cty influencing judges, and real estate deals there.

But Baptists and other teetotalling fascists~especially around the time SESTA was being ridiculed for the fraud that it is, abd every other western vrelugion practices it~they are PETRIFIED that their cult/sectarian myths are not going over so well in the post internet world.

And, if I recall, this comment section was attacked more than once by these religious fanatics of many stripes (I would LOVE to peek at Techdirts server logs and see vwho peeks .in as we comment here) during the sneaky SESTA/FOSTA back door bill passage.